Saturday, 6 September 2008

Overweight people are significantly more likely to develop a range of common cancers, a major study has found.

"The findings show the extent to which an individual's risk of contracting seven types of cancer increases with every pound of weight put on. People who lose weight can reduce their chance of developing the disease.

In the study, which is published in the British Journal of Cancer this week, researchers analysed data from around the world on obesity, weight gain and weight loss in relation to cancers of the breast, pancreas, kidney, colon, prostate, oesophagus and endometrium, which is the lining of the womb.

Ed Yong, health information manager at Cancer Research UK said: "Most people associate high body weight with conditions like diabetes and heart disease, and a lot of people are not aware of the links between body weight and cancer.

"This is a very important and growing issue. Maintaining a healthy body weight is one of the most important things you can do to prevent cancer after not smoking.

"If you look at these cancers, they include two of the most common, breast and colon, and some which have very low survival rates, pancreatic and oesophagus. So body weight has a substantial impact on cancers that are common and those that are difficult to treat."

In the study, carried out at the Washington University School of Medicine in the US, the cancer which emerged as having the clearest link to weight gain was breast cancer in postmenopausal women. The risk of catching the disease increased by five per cent with every five kilograms of weight gained.

Weight gain in adulthood accounts for almost a quarter of cases of the disease in older women, the study found. Around 45,000 cases of breast cancer are diagnosed each year in the UK, eighty per cent of which are in women over the age of 50. Conversely, women who lost weight were at a significantly lower risk of the disease. Researchers believe this may be because weight loss lowers oestrogen levels."

Obesity and its connection with cancer risk has been written about in this blog for a couple of years and for much longer than that on my website. - The way to reduce the problem is to tell the truth about obesity and the salt connection. - When is the medical profession going to own up to the harm it has done by attributing obesity to overeating and not to the true cause, which is fluid retention, itself frequently caused by prescribed medications?